American painter, the central visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance's second generation and the author of one of the most ambitious sustained narratives of Black American history ever produced in paint — the sixty-panel Migration of the Negro (now The Migration Series, 1940–41), which tells the story of the Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to the industrial North in the first decades of the 20th century.
Lawrence grew up in Depression-era Harlem, studied at the WPA-funded Harlem Art Workshop under Charles Alston, and absorbed both the formal vocabulary of modernist painting (flat color, compressed space, geometric rhythm) and the political-historical seriousness of the Harlem intellectual circles around Alston's 306 studio. His early narrative series established the method: a large number of small panels, each carrying a title card, together telling a single story. Toussaint L'Ouverture (41 panels, 1938) on the Haitian Revolution; Frederick Douglass (32 panels, 1938–39); Harriet Tubman (31 panels, 1939–40); and then the Migration Series, completed at age 23 and acquired, in two halves, by the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection.
The later series extended the method: John Brown (22 panels, 1941); War (14 panels, 1947), based on his own service in the Coast Guard; Struggle: From the History of the American People (30 panels, 1954–56). The painting style remained remarkably consistent across sixty years — tempera and gouache, saturated color, rhythm of repeated forms — and the subject matter remained the long history of Black American labor, struggle, and migration. Lawrence taught for the last three decades of his life, principally at the University of Washington, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
What he does that few other American painters have done: treat Black American history as a subject for extended narrative painting, on the scale at which Western art has traditionally treated religious cycles, dynastic history, or national founding myths — and without either sentimentalizing it or reducing it to an exhibit of outrages.